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March 29

One scene on the roadside of war will remain sharp in my memory among all these scenes in the wilderness which the Germans have made behind them, through which I have been passing. It is because of the courage of old women who sat there on the way.

It was beyond Péronne, and through the open country where our cavalry patrols are working, and in the village of Tincourt. Up beyond Lagnicourt the guns yesterday were firing heavily, and sharp gusts of wind blew forward the noise of a greater and farther bombardment, deep and low. Quite close, the village of Roisel, taken by our troops the day before, was still smouldering, and all around for miles was the long black trail of war with hundreds of villages and farmsteads laid low by fire and dynamite before the Germans left them in retreat. But in Tincourt only the outer streets and the neighbouring, separate buildings had been destroyed. The main part of the village was still standing, though the enemy had shelled it a little the day before. When I came into it I saw that it was one of the few places left by the Germans, because it was a concentration camp of civilians driven in from other villages while they were being smashed.

The people were gathered about the roadway, about two hundred of them, sitting or standing among piles of bundles, like refugees in the old days of the war. There were many old, old women among them in black dresses and bonnets, and a group of young girls, of fifteen or so, and small boys and children in arms. They were looking down the road anxiously, and I found that they were waiting for British lorries and ambulances to take them away to safer country, beyond the reach of German shell-fire. They were people who had just been liberated from hostile rule. The grey tide of the German army had swept back from them, and they found themselves once again free people of France, with news of France, and of the world on the other side of the trenches and the wire which for two years and a half had shut them in with the enemy.

I spoke with the old women, these brave old grandmothers who were sitting homeless and houseless on their bundles in the midst of a ruined countryside, within reach of the guns. They were not weeping but smiling. They were not afraid but scornful of the perils through which they had passed.

They were thin because they had stinted for their grandchildren, and they had suffered great misery, but they held their old grey heads high, and said, "For our sons' sake we endured all things."

They are the grandmothers of the babes who know nothing of all this war, and one day will be told, and the mothers of men who have fought and died, and who fight and die with supreme self-sacrifice in the shambles of this war. They are women worthy of hero sons, themselves heroic. They were not passionate against the enemy, only contemptuous of him, and of his rule of them. They liked some of the German soldiers and made no accusations of individual brutality, but cursed the spirit which had laid waste their villages, and destroyed their houses and orchards, and taken away their young girls and all men to the age of fifty. They spoke with the dispassionate eloquence of people who have been in earthquakes and shipwrecks and tornadoes. German cruelty was natural, inevitable, and unarguable, and the soldiers who had done these things were the slaves of the fate which ordained their acts.

"I was taken to Roisel from my own village farther back," said one old lady. "They burnt my house and my neighbours' houses and drove us forward. Roisel was all in flames when we passed through. The fires came out of the houses, and the heat of them scorched us. Then we came to Tincourt, and yesterday they shelled us. The little ones were afraid. Our young girls were weeping and full of terror.

"You will understand that it is hard to see one's village destroyed, and to see one's sisters taken away, and not to know what is to happen next. For us old women it was not so bad. We are too old to weep, having wept too much. We thought of our sons who have died for France. We showed our scorn for the enemy by hiding our fear."

"They know they are beaten," said the old ladies. "They ask always for peace. They are afraid of the punishment which God holds in store for them for all this wickedness."

"Yes," said one of the old women, "they will be punished. What we have suffered they will suffer. All this"—she thrust up a skinny hand towards the ruined land behind her—"must be paid for."

"It is William who will pay," said another old woman, "with his head."

It was like the talk of the Greek Fates, the three old women who held the thread and spun the thread and snipped the thread—this talk of the old women of Tincourt, so passionless, so hard, so fair, so certain. But I marvelled at their courage, sitting there on their bundles, after tramping away from their blazing homesteads, waiting for British lorries to take them away from a place which, even then, was registered by German guns, with the young girls, and the babies who were born under hostile rule.